COLORADO SPRINGS — — As an 18-year-old high school baseball prodigy, Tyler Matzek had scouts flipping over his gifts. He was a virtuoso, a pimple-faced kid with a very adult arm.

"Coming up, I was always a little better than every single person I played," Matzek said. "So I didn't have to worry about working hard or failing."

But almost everyone crashes. And thinking too much about the busts can be a liability. Think. Think some more. Then think about thinking. It can be a paralyzing spiral.

"It all comes back to the same thing," Matzek said. "It's about seeing the positive and not seeing the negative."

In the never-ending churn of big-league baseball development, five years can seem like a lifetime. But five years after he was in the same prospect conversation as Stephen Strasburg, Matzek seems at last on the verge of meeting his enormous potential.

On his heels are two younger, more recently touted pitching prospects — Eddie Butler and Jon Gray — who are trying to lap Matzek and beat him to the bigs.

But the 23-year-old Matzek — a 6-foot-3, 210-pound left-hander — has rescued a pro career that too soon appeared weary and about to fizzle. With injuries popping up in the Rockies' rotation on seemingly a weekly basis, he may now be just a phone call away from a long-awaited, big-league shot.

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Matzek is pitching the best baseball of his life with the Triple-A Colorado Springs Sky Sox. But more important, he's learning to fend with the times he couldn't find home plate. And that certainly happened.

All he had to do was stop thinking about it.

The Rockies invested a then-team record $3.9 million signing bonus in Matzek soon after he graduated from Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo, Calif. They had just grabbed Matzek with the 11th pick in the first round of the 2009 MLB draft.

Knocked off the fast track

Matzek offered a beacon of optimism for a franchise desperate for top-flight, homegrown arms.

He was the seventh pitcher to that point picked by the Rockies in the first round during the tenure of general manager Dan O'Dowd. Among that group, only Jeff Francis has made a significant major-league impact.

So Matzek started his pro career on a fast track at Single-A Asheville in 2010. He did fine, with a 2.92 ERA despite some wildness. And even though he regressed in 2011 with a 4.36 ERA and 50 walks in 64 innings, his potential got him promoted to High-A Modesto.

But his control got worse. He was striking out hitters at a clip better than one per inning — he struggled through 46 walks in 33 innings, and his ERA ballooned to 9.82.

He wasn't pitching his way out of problems on the mound. So the Rockies sent him home to California, a desperate move to help salvage their top pitching prospect.

"My mechanics had gotten to a point where I couldn't physically throw a strike. And my mind got to a point where it wouldn't let me," Matzek said. "I'd never failed like that in my life."

He was on the verge of the yips, a half-baked term that's grown to mythic proportions in baseball. The game's history is lined with players whose careers were hobbled by the yips — Pittsburgh's Steve Blass in the 1970s, St. Louis' Rick Ankiel more recently — a mental block that suddenly, somehow prohibits a pitcher from finding the strike zone.

"I was 18 years old and going against guys who were 22, so I started getting beat up a little bit," Matzek said. "And it slowly went downhill from there. I had to pick myself back up."

'Building the house back up'

Matzek went home for a mental break, to assess what was wrong and hammer out his mechanics.

The Rockies assigned him to talk to the club's roving mental skills coach, Andy McKay, a former college coach who now carries the title "Peak Performance Coordinator" with the team.

Matzek's rehab started with a bunch of book work before even getting to a field.

McKay told Matzek to read a golf book — written by Bob Rotella, a psychologist — titled "The 15th Club: The Inner Secret to Great Golf." Matzek doesn't even play golf. But he recognized that a pre-putt routine is a lot like a pre-pitch routine.

When he turned pro, Matzek was entirely too focused on getting zeros — no hits, no walks, no baserunners at all. So when it didn't work, the chatter in his head got louder and louder.

Over weeks of conversations with McKay, Matzek learned to see what he wanted instead of thinking about it. He worked on visualizing pitches and not worrying about negative results.

"It was all about competing and being able to really not care about anything besides getting the guy out," Matzek said. "It changed my mind-set about how I pitch today."

The next year, the Rockies brought Matzek back to Modesto. His break didn't prove to be a quick fix. He was back to flashing big-league promise, producing 153 strikeouts in 142 innings. But he was still inexact, with 95 walks.

"I wasn't perfect when I came back," he said. "But I started building the house back up, nail by nail."

Matzek moved to Double-A Tulsa last season and cut his walks to 76 in 142 innings, and finished with a 3.79 ERA.

"He really learned from all his experiences," said Tulsa catcher Dustin Garneau, who worked out with Matzek through the past winter. "I believe he's over the hump."

Simplified success

Matzek leads Sky Sox starters this season with a 3.04 ERA and 31 strikeouts through five starts. His control remains an issue, with a team-high 13 walks. But he has an impressive 1.09 WHIP (walks and hits allowed per inning pitched), and Triple-A batters are hitting only .167 against him.

"He's nasty, just filthy," said Rockies reliever Chris Martin, who was recently called up from Colorado Springs.

"As long as he's not giving up runs, nothing else matters," Martin said. "You just have to minimize the damage and keep going."

But no statistic can give an accurate scouting account of the pitcher who, in 2011, gave up eight runs in just over an inning for Asheville, then struck out 13 hitters in seven innings a month later.

"They all have physical tools. So what's the separator? It's that mental side of it," Sky Sox manager Glenallen Hill said. "This game will expose all of that at some point."

The Rockies have Matzek signed to a one-year, $500,000 contract. He pitched in major-league camp during spring training this year for the first time. When camp broke, Matzek met with manager Walt Weiss, pitching coach Jim Wright, assistant general manager Bill Geivett, player development director Jeff Bridich and Hill.

Matzek's takeaway? Work on his changeup and his command, and he could get the call to pitch at Coors Field.

His worry, he said, is no longer the issue.

"The game comes down to the last 90 feet, from third base to home," Matzek said. "If nobody goes from third base to home plate, it means nothing. That's the philosophy I've really learned since the time when I wasn't throwing the ball so well. It simplified the game."

New coordinator pushes Buffs to work, play at level he expectsJim Leavitt has discovered this much about his new defense at Colorado: He has some talent with which to work, but his players need to put it in another gear. Full Story

New coordinator pushes Buffs to work, play at level he expectsJim Leavitt has discovered this much about his new defense at Colorado: He has some talent with which to work, but his players need to put it in another gear. Full Story